Just as the 2023 pro wrestling period piece drama “The Iron Claw” was a sports movie with an asterisk because the outcomes of the matches were scripted in advance, the same could be said of the rousing albeit unabashedly corny biopic “Queen of the Ring.”
In both cases, the in-ring intensity isn’t quite on the level of a “Raging Bull” or a “Bleed for This,” or even wholly fictional films such as “Rocky” or “Million Dollar Baby,” because with the rare exception of a “shoot match” where wrestlers go off script and the battles become real, pro wrestlers are following a storyline that has been mapped out in advance.
Still, though there’s no denying that the wrestlers in both “The Iron Claw” and “Queen of the Ring” gave their blood, sweat and tears to the sport and were great athletes — and in both cases, arguably their most formidable and abusive foe was a Svengali-like promoter and patriarch who built them up, only to try to tear them down at every turn.
“Queen of the Ring” writer-director Ash Avildsen is a legacy underdog-sports-movie filmmaker, given his late father John Avildsen helmed “Rocky” and the first three films in the “Karate Kid” franchise. (We’re even treated to a cameo by the one and only Martin Kove from “The Karate Kid” and “Cobra Kai” in this film.)
Based on a book titled (deep breath) “The Queen of the Ring: Sex, Muscles, Diamonds and the Making of an American Legend” by Jeff Leen, this is the story of Mildred Burke, who is said to be the first million-dollar female athlete due to her enormous popularity as a wrestling champion whose reign stretched from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s. With director Avildsen embracing melodramatic dialogue that fits the time period and Emily Bett Rickards (“Arrow”) turning in a (literally) muscular and screen-commanding performance, “Queen of the Ring” checks off all the familiar boxes of the sports biopic, from the hardscrabble beginnings to the big break to the meteoric rise to stardom to the fall from grace to the inspirational comeback.
Ash Avildsen has his father’s talent for staging fight sequences that are clearly heightened for dramatic effect but still carry a wallop of authenticity, and cinematographer Andrew Strahorn employs various filters and lighting techniques to expertly capture the mid-20th century settings.
When we first see Mildred, she’s an unwed teenage mother working endless hours in a Kansas diner alongside her mother Bertha (Cara Buono). Millie has a crazy dream of becoming a famous entertainer of some sort, and when the promoter Billy Wolfe (Josh Lucas) brings his traveling wrestling show through town, that’s it, that’s the calling for Millie. She’s going to become a professional wrestler.
Cue the sequences where Millie becomes a sensation on the carnival circuit, falling in love with the wily and charming but snake-like Billy along the way. (Millie eventually has a closer relationship with Billy’s good-hearted son “G Bill,” played by Tyler Posey, who worships her — but the controlling and cruel Billy will never let them be together, even as he regularly cheats on Mildred, physically abuses her and eventually is divorced from her. Josh Lucas is devastatingly effective as the villainous Billy.)
Writer-director Avildsen has publicly lamented that “Queen of the Ring” might have worked better as a limited series, given he had to cut an hour from the film’s running time, and the gaps in the narrative are sometimes apparent. The story is overstuffed with a bounty of wrestlers, and while Toni Storm, Kamille, Francesca Eastwood, Trinity Fatu, Damaris Lewis and Deborah Ann Woll, among others, do fine work, some of the characters they play get short shrift.
Adam Demos is also effective but drifts in and out of the film as Gorgeous George, Walton Goggins plays the wrestling promoter Jack Pfefer and the aforementioned Martin Kove plays yet another promoter, Al Haft, while Gavin Casalengo is Mildred’s grown son. Terrific actors one and all, but with Emily Bett Rickards doing such powerful work as Mildred, and Mildred’s story carrying so much dramatic weight on its own, the film might have been benefited from fewer characters and storylines.
Still, “Queen of the Ring” is a satisfying slice of entertainment about one of the true pioneers in the world of women’s professional wrestling.